Marcel Fournier (University of Montreal)

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Marcel Fournier - Professor of sociology at the University of Montreal - received the title of Honoris Causa on the 15th October 2018.

Photo : Marcel Fournier © Emilie Tournevache
Marcel Fournier © Emilie Tournevache

Marcel Fournier, Professor at the University of Montreal, is an internationally renowned sociologist who has published authoritative works on the history of our discipline, both in France (notably on the Durkheim School) and in Canada.

Research, collaboration, distinctions

Prof. Fournier's two monumental intellectual biographies of Marcel Mauss (1994) and Emile Durkheim (2007) have shown him to be the best current specialist in the French School of Sociology. They illustrate the extent of the author’s skills, as a historian of facts and ideas, a sociologist of cultural works, knowledge and science, and a biographer of individuals and institutions. In addition, the work of this attentive observer and analyst of Canadian society has made him a recognised expert in Canadian cultural issues, in all their diverse dimensions: social, political, economic and anthropological.

As well as his expertise in Quebec-Canadian works of genius, Marcel Fournier, the champion of an ambitious sociology of culture in a field where, too often, an unsettled impressionism prevails, gives us a true “research programme”, wide-ranging in its theoretical and methodological scope.

Marcel Fournier has had a close and longstanding relationship and collaboration with the University of Bordeaux. Not only is Bordeaux one of the preferred areas of research for this historian and biographer of Durkheim who, we should remember, spent the first and no doubt the most fruitful part of his career here, but the Faculty of Sociology has welcomed Marcel Fournier on many occasions, to the delight of staff and students alike.

The DHC for Prof. Fournier was proposed by Charles-Henry Cuin, Professor emeritus of sociology (Centre Emile-Durkheim – University of Bordeaux, Sciences Po Bordeaux, CNRS).